Where those associated with Western films from around the world are laid to rest.

Tuesday, September 10, 2013

RIP Saul Landau

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Saul Landau, a prolific, award-winning documentary filmmaker
who traveled the world profiling political leaders like Cuba's Fidel Castro and
Chile's Salvador Allende and used his camera to draw attention to war, poverty
and racism, has died. He was 77.

Landau, who had been battling bladder
cancer for two years, died Monday night at home in Alameda, Calif., with his
children and grandchildren, said colleague John Cavanagh, director of the
Institute for Policy Studies.

The director, producer and writer of more
than 40 documentaries had continued to work almost until his death. He regularly
submitted essays to the Huffington Post and elsewhere, sometimes writing from
his hospital bed, according to his son, Greg. He was also working on a
documentary on homophobia in Cuba.

Landau authored of 14 books. While
most covered issues like radical politics, consumer culture and globalization,
one of them, My Dad Was Not Hamlet, was a collection of poetry.

His
documentaries tackled a variety of issues, but each contained one underlying
theme: reporting on a subject that was otherwise going largely unnoticed at the
time, whether it was American ghetto life, the destruction of an indigenous
Mexican culture or the inner workings of the CIA.

"We tried to take on
themes that nobody else was taking on and that were important," Landau told the
Associated Press in July.

His most acclaimed documentary was likely
1979's Paul Jacobs and the Nuclear Gang, which examined the effects of radiation
exposure to people living downwind from Nevada's above-ground nuclear bomb tests
in the 1950s. The film received a George Polk Award for investigative reporting
and other honors.

It took its name from Landau's friend Paul Jacobs, who
contracted cancer that he believed was caused by radiation exposure. He died
before the film was completed.

Landau told the AP one of the
documentaries he was most proud of was The Sixth Sun: Mayan Uprising in Chiapas,
which looked at the 1994 rebellion by the impoverished indigenous people of
southern Mexico. Landau traveled to Chiapas to interview, among others, the
masked revolutionary leader known as Subcommandante Marcos.

His 1968
documentary Fidel gave U.S. audiences one of their earliest close-ups of the
revolutionary leader who installed communism in Cuba. It came about after a
brief meeting with Castro, who told Landau he had seen a news report he had done
on Cuba the year before.

"He said he liked the film very much and asked
me what my next film was going to be," Landau recalled. "I said, 'I'd like to do
one on you.'"

In 1971, Landau and fellow filmmaker Haskell Wexler
traveled to Chile for a rare U.S. interview with Allende, who had just been
elected his country's president and who would die two years later in a military
coup.

Although he made more than three dozen films, Landau said he never
set out to be a filmmaker.

"I didn't set out to be anything," he said in
July. "I just fell into it."

Landau graduated from the University of
Wisconsin, Madison, and after moving to San Francisco he was at various times a
film distributor, author, playwright and member of the San Francisco Mime
Troupe.

Two of his earliest books, The New Radicals and To Serve The
Devil (both co-written with Jacobs), led to his being approached by a San
Francisco public television station that wanted a report on ghetto conditions in
Oakland. The result was his first documentary, 1966's Losing Just The
Same.
A frequent commentator on radio and television in later years,
Landau was also a professor emeritus at California State Polytechnic University,
Pomona, where he taught history and digital media.

About Me

Born in Toledo, Ohio in 1946 I have a BA degree in American History from Cal St. Northridge. I've been researching the American West and western films since the early 1980s and visiting filming sites in Spain and the U.S.A. Elected a member of the Spaghetti Western Hall of Fame 2010.